The nightmare went on for more than a decade, but Anthony Robinson '83 finally succeeded in clearing his name. Now he's focused on reclaiming his interrupted dreams.

In some ways Anthony Robinson '83 is a typical law-school student.

He studies deep into the night. He works to master the intricacies of contracts and torts. He sweats his grades with an eye on the job market. It's tough but rewarding, his long-held ambition flowering at last. This is the sort of life he envisioned when he graduated from Pomona College with a degree in sociology.

But Robinson has a background, and a passion, setting him apart from many aspiring attorneys. He knows first hand, for example, that the criminal justice system can be brutally unfair. Just because something is legal, he likes to say, doesn't mean it is just.

Such knowledge wasn't easily won. Robinson didn't gain it through books, movies or simple observation. He got it by spending nearly a decade in a Texas prison for a rape he did not commit.

His journey from classroom to prison cell to classroom took its critical turn in Houston, in 1986, when a young white woman told police she had been raped by a black man in a plaid shirt.

Robinson was wearing a plaid shirt. He was black, and he was in the neighborhood. That was pretty much all it took to keep him behind bars for the next nine years and 10 months.

Never mind that he had spent his life to that point playing by the rules; he had gone to college, served in the Army, then found himself a steady job. That counted for nothing when Robinson found himself in the grip of the system.

"You go through your whole life and you think, 'I've done what I'm supposed to do,'" he said. "But all of a sudden you fit the description."

The trial was quick, the sentence long: 27 years. "When I heard that," Robinson said, "I'm thinking, 'I'm dead.' It just ripped my soul out of my body. 'I'm dead.'"

Robinson had grown up in and around Los Angeles, raised by a single mother. "My family was broke almost perpetually," he said. He avoided the temptations and the street-corner hustlers, and graduated from James Monroe High School in Sepulveda.

In 1978 he enrolled at Pomona College. "Pomona was my first real break in life," he said.

He lived in Harwood Hall and played wide receiver on the football team, which was not in those years a gridiron power. "You learned how to be the underdog. You never gave up," he said. "When you played Sagehen ball, the only thing you had to remember was, it'll be over in a little bit."

Robinson recalls several professors fondly. One was Robert Herman '51. "He motivated me in ways it's hard to explain," Robinson said. "He taught me there's a whole wealth of things going on that most people don't know about."

Another inspiration was George Hesslink, who taught sociology at Pomona from 1968 to 1981 and who came to the rescue when Robinson was thinking of dropping out.

"He's the one who offered me a research assistant's job when I was on the edge," Robinson said. "Dr. Hesslink said, 'You've got to look outside of yourself sometimes just to figure out how you fit in.'"

Many students pick up such lessons in perseverance and perspective during their college years.

For Robinson, they would soon become vital to his survival.

After graduation, Robinson enlisted in the Army. By 1986 he was out, living in Houston, and thinking of law school. In the meantime he was working as the manager for an auto parts store.

One chilly January morning he agreed to do a favor for a friend, and everything changed.

Robinson took a bus to the campus of the University of Houston. There, he planned to pick up the keys to his friend's car and take it for a brake job.

He retrieved her keys from a laboratory desk--the friend was not there--and went downstairs to the parking lot. Robinson had been on campus for perhaps ten minutes.

Just as he was starting the car, a campus police cruiser pulled in behind him, blocking his exit. The officer ordered him from the car and began to question him.

"I'm thinking, OK, it's just a routine bust," Robinson said. "They're gonna hassle you, scare you a little bit, tell you to get the hell off campus."

What Robinson did not know was that a 22-year-old woman had reported being sexually assaulted 15 minutes earlier in the bathroom of a nearby university auditorium. She described her assailant as a black man in jeans, green jacket and a plaid shirt. Robinson fit the description.

As the officer questioned Robinson, another police car pulled up. The rape victim was in the back seat. She looked out the window and identified Robinson as her attacker. "That's when the cop says, 'Stuff him,'" Robinson said.

Robinson was anxious but hopeful as he went to trial. "It was clear to me they would be able to figure out a mistake had been made."

Many of the circumstances seemed to favor him. He had no criminal record, and fingerprints taken from the crime scene did not match his. None of the victim's hairs were found in his clothing, and none of his hair was discovered on her.

The victim told police the rapist smelled like cigarettes. Robinson did not smoke. The victim also said her attacker told her he was newly released from prison and had indicated he had no money. Mr. Robinson had $169 in cash on him when he was arrested.

What is often a crucial piece of prosecution evidence in rape cases--the matching of the attacker's semen to his blood type--was useless this time. Crime lab tests showed that Robinson and the victim were of identical blood types. Technicians therefore could not tell whether the cell samples from a vaginal swab came from him or her.

So for Robinson, the chances of acquittal looked fairly good. Then the victim took the stand. "She was just a dream witness," said the Harris County prosecutor, Doug Davis. "She was very pretty and well-spoken." She once again identified Robinson as the rapist.

With no physical evidence, the victim's testimony became the sole link between Robinson and the crime. For the jury--nine whites, two Latinos and one black--it was enough. Randy Schaffer of Houston, Robinson's current lawyer, said race sealed the outcome. "You make it a white complainant and a black defendant in a rape case," he said, "and a Texas jury will convict 99 percent of the time."

Prosecutor Davis dismissed the racial angle and said the victim was key. "She never wavered in her identification." Davis added, with the benefit of 16 years of hindsight, "She just made an honest mistake."

Robinson was shattered and outraged by the verdict, and naïve about what awaited him. His first couple of weeks in prison, he told everyone he met that he was not guilty. Then he got some advice. "My supervisor said, 'You'd better stop doing that, or you're going to get killed. Because if you're innocent, that means you're not tough.'"

To reveal weakness could be fatal, he realized. So he shut up, put on a hard exterior, fought when he had to fight, and busied himself seeking a rehearing of his case. He spent hour after hour in the prison law library, and filed hundreds of pages of appeals with various courts.

One after another his applications were rejected by judges. Robinson grew ever more despairing and desperate. He even contemplated an escape.

"I thought, If they're not going to play by the rules, then all bets are off," he said.

But as he had done all his life, Robinson followed regulations, one day after another, until nearly ten years passed. He was paroled in November 1996, and he walked out of prison wearing donated plaid pants and a fluorescent green shirt. He found himself looking at the world through a lens of suspicion.

"I got on the bus and this girl smiled and said, 'How you doing?' I freaked out and got off the bus. I'm thinking, 'Why's she speaking to me? I don't know her. Maybe she's going to set me up.'"

Robinson returned to Houston and the life of a parolee. That meant a series of minimum-wage jobs and mandatory counseling sessions. He attended the sessions once a week, joining a dozen or so pedophiles and rapists, sitting in a circle. One by one, they were required to stand and say, "I am a sex offender."

Those words, Robinson found, were almost impossible for him to say. "I said, 'It doesn't do me any good to lie about committing a crime.' The therapist told me, 'You are in denial.'"

Robinson's choice was to lie or face parole revocation. So he stood and declared himself to be a sex offender. "In the back of your mind you're saying, 'If I don't do this, I'm going back to prison for 17 years.' You start to look at truth in a different way."

He kept going because he had a singular goal in mind: to clear his name. Robinson needed to save enough money--several thousand dollars--for a DNA test of the evidence in his rape case.

Such sophisticated testing was not in general use when Robinson was convicted. But since the late 1980s, dozens of convictions have been overturned through DNA analysis of physical evidence like hair, blood, skin, semen and saliva.

It took Robinson three years to scrape together the money. He hired a lawyer who specialized in DNA-based appeals. After the proper court papers were filed, samples from the original blood and semen evidence were sent to a private lab in Maryland that specializes in DNA analysis.

The results came back within a few weeks. Almost 13 years after his conviction, Robinson finally got official proof of his innocence. He threw no parties and made no celebrations. "It was just another step for me," he said. "I'm not so wild about things anymore."

Instead, he continued resolutely on. The next step was to seek a pardon. In late 2000, Gov. George W. Bush issued state proclamation number 2000-00007. It stated that Robinson was granted "a full pardon based on innocence and restoration of full civil rights of citizenship that may have heretofore been lost."

It was the state's way of saying that a terrible error had been made, that his life is his own again. Except it's not, which even the judge who presided over his trial admits.

"I wish it hadn't happened," said former State District Judge Mary Bacon. "Because after a prison term, no one is ever the same again."

Robinson is 41 now. His hairline is receding and his waistline expanding, but he has done little middle-age settling in. In ways large and small, he forms his days in the shadow of his prison years. "Fear, shame and dread," he said. "I had 10 years in prison to perfect it. You don't just wake up one day and turn it off."

Although he married in 1998, for more than three years he would not live with his wife, for fear that she would be harmed by a rape-avenging vigilante.

Sometimes he would awaken at night and check his door, just to be certain he wasn't locked in. "To make sure," he said, "that I'm not just dreaming about being free."

Robinson developed "an obsessive concern about being able to account for my time." He must be ready, he explained, in case the police try to pin another phony charge on him. "If it happened one time," he said, "what's to say it won't happen a second time?" He lived, in part, like someone on the run. "I don't give my phone number to anybody," he said. "I don't give my address to anybody. They could just come by and grab me."

Today, the anxiety and dread have begun to diminish. Still, everywhere Robinson goes--store, restaurant, restroom, school--he takes a copy of his pardon with him, just in case he's stopped by police.

Robinson remains bitterly critical of authorities, believing that police never seriously investigated his case. For example, fingerprints taken from the crime scene were not compared to those of sex offenders fresh out of prison.

Prosecutor Davis, now an assistant U.S. attorney in Houston, believes the case was properly brought, given the limits of the time. "Unfortunately, I put an innocent guy in prison," he said. "All I can do is apologize to him."

Robinson has never heard from the victim whose testimony convicted him. She is married now and living near Houston. "I really feel sorry for her, because she's been betrayed twice," he said. "The guy who raped her violated her, and she was lied to by the state."

Despite his lingering anger and bitterness, life is by no means all bleak for Robinson now. He is in line for a settlement from the state that could be as much as $25,000 for each year he was in prison. He's also spending at least a few nights a week with his wife.

And his enrollment in law school last fall has him feeling that he finally has, after 16 years of pain, despair and humiliation, put himself back on track.

Just getting to school, however, is an effort. The Thurgood Marshall School of Law at Texas Southern University is about half a mile from the scene of Robinson's arrest. "Even driving by there gives me the willies," he said.

He took four courses in the fall semester: contracts, torts, lawyering process and civil procedure. He also works full time in the warehouse of an oil pipeline supplier. A typical day for him begins at the warehouse at 7 a.m., and ends with studying at home, well past midnight. "I don't get much sleep," he said. "I feel like an octopus learning to juggle."

Robinson said the training he received during his undergraduate years is proving invaluable. "The research ability Pomona honed into me, and the analytical skills, are paying off even now."

He also believes his horrible experience at the hands of the law had a paradoxically beneficial effect. Because of it, he said, he will be a better lawyer.

When he graduates in 2004, Robinson hopes to practice corporate or international law. Then, "once my family's taken care of," he plans to switch to public interest legal work and help "the many people like me" caught in the criminal justice machinery.

Through it all, Robinson has maintained faith in the law and the legal system.

"I do believe the law works, but it's the people who make the system worthy of being respected," he said. "Even though the law didn't hear my initial plea, once I was spit back into the world, the door was left open."

And after 10 years in a place where such things didn't exist, Robinson is a man who knows the value of an open door.

--Doug J. Swanson is a reporter for the Dallas Morning News.